Favorite Schools

Favorite Teams

Opinion: Congress suffers from ' twin failures to produce effective public policy and work with the president'

President Obama Delivers State of The Union Address

U.S. President Barack Obama, center, autographs copies of his speech for members of Congress as he departs after delivering the State of the Union address at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2014.
(Larry Downing/Pool photo via Bloomberg)

No one looking for a model of organizational efficiency would pick the American Congress. Its twin failures to produce effective public policy and work with the president offer several cautionary truths about how not to facilitate effective organizational communication.

To be sure, there is some cooperation at the staff level, and examples of effective bipartisan cooperation have occasionally been on display, as with the 2012 passage of several jobs bills. But the oft-heard cliché is now part of our political legacy: Congress is a broken institution, with public approval ratings to match.

While this branch of the federal establishment was not designed to work with the relative efficiency of a parliament, where a head of government is chosen from the party that wins a plurality of seats, congressional dysfunction now routinely leaves much on the table that should be addressed, from immigration reform to timely judicial appointments. We knew the institution was in deep trouble last year, when a sizable number of members were ready to risk a government default and the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, all for the purpose of pressing a dubious ideological point.

What’s wrong? What best practices for communicating in organizations are routinely ignored? Briefly, some of the overwhelming problems on Capitol Hill have their origins in two ineffective communication practices. The first is that the body of 535 is organized into factions — notably parties, special-interest caucuses and their media — that now make it possible to work in the nearly perfect isolation of an echo chamber. Since most of the process of legislating is done away from the floors of the House and Senate, it falls to party leaders, whips and members to work out in private and with their own caucuses what they will accept by way of a legislative agenda. Meetings across partisan divides are now less frequent. Long-serving members note that members in opposing parties now rarely socialize after work or even eat together while in session. Partisanship and its companion of almost complete separation dominate, making it easier to think the worst of political opponents.

This problem is compounded by a long tradition of individual offices set up as separate fiefdoms and spread over six buildings on the east side of the capitol. One wonders how different legislative life would be if the 100 members of the Senate worked in the conditions known to most of white-collar America: in the same ‘cubicle farm’ in one building on the same floor. Support staffs who enable the isolation of members might help the republic by similarly moving to a different floor, encouraging more functional discussion across party lines.

Aside from the segmentation of large groups of like-minded factions, a second problem is in the changing character of those seeking high public office. In the age of the internet and 24-hour news, there seems to be more interest in the expressive possibilities of being a member of Congress than actually doing the work of governing. In the lore of Congress, there has always been an expectation that the “show horses” would sometimes eclipse the “work horses.” A retired Lyndon Johnson once complained to a CBS producer about the “pretty boys” created by the growth of television. His point as a former Senate majority leader is that visual media gave rise to a new breed of members more interested in the theater of politics than finding ways to bridge differences. Along with the ego-rewards of surfacing as a national authority on an issue, the additional burden of continually raising campaign funds now seem to be all-consuming goals.

Congress is the best example of the price we can pay when the rewards of public performance are greater than those of private negotiation. So, it offers some cautionary reminders to the rest of us working in complex bureaucracies. First, we can’t afford to isolate ourselves from others who will have to sign on to our initiatives. Leading still means using tact and a host of rhetorical skills to sustain relations with those who have different views. In addition, since it’s a solid axiom that we more easily find comity in small groups, trying to forge leadership within large bodies needs to be seen for the problem it frequently is: the organizational equivalent of a very long night at a karaoke bar.

Gary C. Woodward is a professor of communication studies at The College of New Jersey. His blog is theperfectresponse.com.